Tales of Chills and Thrills: The Mystery Thriller Horror Box Set (7 Mystery Thriller Horror Novels) (48 page)

Samuel looked at Major, and then back to
Mara. Kole continued to sit on the floor, using his finger to draw concentric
circles in the dust.

“There.”

Major shook his head in frustration as he
looked outside a second too late, but Samuel saw it. At first, he chuckled to
himself. He held his breath, withholding judgment until he could take a better
look. What felt like hours passed before the next strike, but Samuel was ready.
His initial curiosity washed away with the surging rain.

The bright bolt illuminated a form
standing twenty yards from the cabin, facing east. Samuel kept telling himself
it was an ape, but he knew better. Mara reached down and grasped his hand,
squeezing hard. She continued to stare out the window, her breathing erratic
and muffled.

“Did you see it?” she asked.

Samuel gave her hand a return squeeze and
looked at Major.

“I did,” Samuel said.

The storm tossed another round of
lightning down from the sky. Samuel wondered whether the dark cloud eating this
place sent the storm or if it happened naturally. Either way, the darkness and
the downpour seemed to conspire against his sanity. The concurrent blasts of
soundless light fastened to the shape like a spotlight.

Samuel held that image in his mind like a
photograph, a single frame of time frozen in memory. The rain matted the man’s
hair to his head, covering the gray, exposed scalp. Water dripped at an angle
as it ran from his chin. Ragged flaps of flesh lay exposed on the man’s face, bloodless
and rotten. Samuel noticed the man wore tattered remnants of clothing that fell
in strips about his body. His arm jutted inward at an unnatural angle.
Artifacts of pants came toward the ground to meet bare feet that sank into the
cold mud left exposed by the melting snow. Nothing on the creature mattered to
Samuel more than its eyes. Samuel looked into the lifeless, black orbs and felt
a whimper crushed within his chest.

“Who could it be?” Mara asked.

Another round of bolts crashed through
the forest as Major stood. He looked over Mara’s tousled, black hair at Samuel.

“There’s more.”

Samuel heard the words enter his ears as
if they came from outside of his own head. He shuddered and felt the muscles in
his abdomen cramp. He could no longer feel Mara’s vise grip on his fingers.

Two more stood behind the first.

“Are they people?” Mara asked, still
hopeful in her heart, but not in her mind.

“They used to be,” Major said.

Samuel looked at him, tilting his head to
one side, awaiting elaboration.

“When I first saw them, I thought they
were reflections, but they’re not. When they appear, the wolves get real
skittish.”

“Undead?” Samuel asked.

“That’s one way to describe them. I think
they’re more like warnings. They come just before the final phases of
reversion. Canaries in the coal mine.”

“Ha,” Kole said, still sitting on the
floor drawing in the dust. “Zombie birds.”

Mara crinkled her face and shook her head
at Kole.

“What do they do?” Samuel asked.

“Not sure,” Major said, shaking his head.
“I’ve only come across them a few times. They don’t do much but draw more of
their kind, like moths to the flame.”

“For fuck’s sake, dude. Are they canaries
or are they moths?” Kole asked. “Tell it like it is, and quit being a fucking
drama queen.”

“He’s just trying to explain what’s
happening, you asshole.”

The outburst from Mara grabbed Samuel’s
attention. He saw her shake her head and heard Kole laugh in response.

“It doesn’t matter, does it, hon? This
place is heading to the shitter with zombie tour guides. Your prince charming
there can slip, but he’s got no way of controlling it and we don’t know
if he can do it without us. Probably has a small pecker, too.”

Samuel shifted and turned his shoulders
toward Kole.

“Everyone quiet down.” Major rubbed his
forehead, trying to think and de-escalate the situation at the same time.

“Tell the bitch to quit her yapping,”
Kole said.

Samuel took a step toward him, and Kole
stood at the same time. The men faced each other, nose to nose. Kole flexed his
biceps.

“Go ahead, Sammy. You want a crack at me,
go ahead.”

Samuel balled both fists. He had eased
the right one back to his hip when he felt Mara grip his wrist.

“Let it be. Don’t give the prick the
fight he wants. Save your strength.”

Samuel looked into Mara’s eyes, and his
fingers eased back from inside his palms. He shook his head at Kole, who hadn’t
moved.

“Why here?” Samuel asked Major as he
stepped away from the confrontation. Kole winked at Mara, and she glared back.

“It could be that the Barren draws them
somehow, like magnets. It drew us here, didn’t it?”

“You told me to come here,” Samuel said.

Major shrugged. “Semantics. You would
have ended up here, regardless.”

“What do we do?” Mara asked.

“There isn’t much we can do. Nobody is
planning a Sunday hike any time soon. We stay here for now.”

“Genius,” Kole said.

“Man, you’re not helping,” Samuel said,
snapping.

“Look,” Mara said.

In the flashes of electricity filling the
sky, the handful of motionless figures had turned into dozens.

***

Although Major passed through many
reversions, he did not have a memory of the horde and did not remember their
function, which was to keep the talisman from being used and to immobilize
anyone who could use it.

As the undead stood shoulder to shoulder,
surrounding the cabin, Major ordered a watch. Samuel and Mara agreed,
while Kole refused to cooperate. His dust drawings had evolved into charcoal
portraits, which he drew on the walls using the ash from the fire. During
Major’s shift, Samuel felt the pull of sleep. He curled into a ball with his
head on the hardwood floor. The image of a train returned as a new dream seeped
into his subconscious.

The track extended to the horizon in
one long, loping stride. It curled like a tail around to the east, where the
setting sun tore a flaming path in the sky on its descent in a bizarre
retrograded motion. A wind moaned outside the cabin car, the noise signifying
to Samuel that he was dreaming. The landscape lay as a flat expanse with an
occasional pile of scree left like crumbs on a table. The dream-world contained
no trees or manmade structures as far as Samuel could see.

He turned his dreaming eye inward to
the passenger cabin. Two rows of seats sat divided by an aisle, two chairs in
each row. The dark cloth on the seats hid stains left by thousands of riders
covering thousands of miles. Samuel looked up and noticed a single, glowing
bulb above his seat. The car rattled and hitched as the train pulled it through
a slight curve in the track, still bearing east on its unknown, eternal voyage.

“I’m not leaving here.”

Samuel turned to his right and saw
Kole in the seat across the aisle, smiling and flipping through a pornographic
magazine.

“I’m dreaming,” Samuel said.

Kole shook his head and chuckled. “No
shit.”

Samuel sat forward and raised his head
above the seats. He looked to the front of the car and then toward the back.

“Just the two of us.”

Samuel turned back to face Kole with a
look of disgust.

“I’ve always hated that song.”

The single reading light flickered and
died, leaving Samuel’s dream self with nothing but the silhouette of empty
seats and Kole’s voice.

“I don’t care, because I die with this
place.” The sentence drained the remaining frivolity from Kole’s voice.

“What about me?” Samuel asked.

“What about you? I don’t know what
your trip is, man. I don’t know what punched your hole or how you slipped. But
I know why I ain’t going home.”

Samuel slid from the window to the
aisle seat. He looked into Kole’s face and saw a line of moisture under one
eye, the darkness concealing everything else.

“I can’t give you absolution, but I
can listen.”

Kole nodded and began. “Always shot my
mouth off before my brain could catch up. Guess they woulda labeled me ADHD
these days, shoved drugs down my throat to cure me. Back in the late ’70s I was
a simple troublemaker. Knew early on college was not in my future. My older bro
got the brains, I got the brawn.”

Samuel saw Kole glance down at his
left bicep.

“After high school, I started to
unravel. Hung out in the wrong places with the wrong people, and sooner or later,
that shit catches up to you. My dad warned me. I always knew he liked me the
best. Well, the best out of the boys. My youngest sister was definitely his
favorite kid. Anyway, he knew where I was headed. He never told us stories of
his childhood, but I had a feeling he’d been up to the same shit, which is why
him and I bonded.

“I ran numbers for a while, and scored
a stash with low-level dealers, mostly street thugs who would sell you a vial
of rat poison and let you die an agonizing death for ten bucks. I found out
selling drugs required much less time than running numbers, and if you skimmed
the inventory, you could get high for free. That’s when I lost control.”

A low, rumbling whistle emerged as the
train continued toward the horizon, now dotted with the first stars of the
evening. A sliver of moon poked up from the underworld. Samuel looked at Kole.

“Drugs make you do shit. They make you
do things you couldn’t imagine doing. The system is broke. I did three stints
in county, and none of them were long enough to straighten me out. All they did
was make me that much more hungry for the good shit, the drugs you can’t get
from dealing with the prison guards. The third time I got out is when it
happened.”

Samuel leaned in closer to Kole. The
floor of the train vibrated underneath his feet and began to rattle his teeth.

“Got hopped up on the synthetic shit.
Some redneck in a trailer probably cooked it up in a bathtub. It was really
bad. I probably woulda been better off if it made my heart explode, but it didn’t.
Nope, just shut my brain down to the point where I was more animal than man.

“I never did deals in a park or in crowded
places. Sure, it was safer and less of a chance of eating a bullet, but I
didn’t give a shit about my own safety by then. That deal in the park shoulda
never gone down, for many reasons.

“My sidekick, Hoppy, set it up with
one of the local street gangs. These thugs got their hands on a crate of
Russian assault rifles, and all of a sudden they were rolling through town with
their cocks swinging. I told Hoppy we didn’t need the score, that we could move
it without dealing with these assholes. But the money was too tempting, and the
drugs fuck with your ability to make rational decisions.”

Kole paused. He knew most of the story
was procrastination. He pushed through, without a choice. “I never saw her.
Well, that’s not true. I stood over her dying body punched with seventeen
bullet holes, but I never saw her before that. Was it my gun? Hoppy’s gun? The
motherfucking
puta
that emptied
his clip in the park? It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Samuel waited, understanding Kole
wasn’t looking for an answer.

“Her mom was in shock. She kept
tugging at the girl’s backpack, trying to brush the blood off of it like it was
dirt. She brushed her daughter’s hair back and ignored the hole that oozed
black blood from her forehead. The scum that tried ripping us off bolted, and
that’s probably what kept Hoppy and me from getting pinched for it. Everyone in
the park fingered the dark-skinned fellas with machine guns strapped to their
backs, fleeing the park at a full sprint. Hoppy and me, we just kinda walked
out. We shoved our handguns into our waistbands and shuffled through the crowd
with the same look of terror everyone else had.

“The court never got a chance to put
them, or us, on trial. That mom never got a chance to speak her mind on her
dead daughter’s behalf. Is it justice? Maybe. The cops caught up to them three
blocks and ten minutes later. Put over sixty rounds in each of the thugs.”

The train accelerated. Samuel felt the
windows vibrate, and looked down at the rock piles now blurring past in the
darkness. Hundreds of white pinpoints appeared in the otherwise-black canvas.

“I think Hoppy met his match under a
bridge about a year later. He thought he was getting a ten-dollar blowjob, but
it turned into a switchblade to the gut. They say it takes a long time to bleed
out that way. That it’s painful. I hope it was. That fucker deserved to die
like a pig.”

“Something is happening with the
train,” Samuel said. “It’s speeding up.”

Kole shook his head. “We ain’t got
much time. I think you know all you need to know about me.”

“Except how you got here,” Samuel
said.

“C’mon, man. Do I have to spell it all
out for you?”

Samuel waited.

“After the deal went south and I
parted ways with Hoppy, I went from King Shit to your average street junkie. I
tried killing myself with that stuff. Man, did I try. But I ran out of money
before I could finish the job. I got real low, as if having that little girl’s
blood on my hands wasn’t low enough. I started doing shit for money, shit I’m
not proud of.”

Samuel raised his eyebrows.

“Sucking dick, okay? Not like it
matters I’m telling you this now. You don’t even know me. But yeah, that’s what
I had to do to get my money for blow. Blow for blow.” Kole watched Samuel
stifle a snicker. “It’s cool, man. I was making a joke.”